The Bird Hermes is my name
by i8thezombie
Summary: Most people shut down when they get over saturated with feeling; most people harden into hate - into indifference - because the biggest risk we ever take is to love without fear. Kaixel.
1. after

First time I've written anything since my last English essay when I was 15. Good times. Cigarette count: 5.

FACT: SATAN IS OFTEN PORTRAYED AS A REDHEAD.

* * *

**NO MATTER HOW  
GOOD SHE LOOKS  
SOMEONE SOMEWHERE  
IS TIRED OF  
HER SHIT**

"Tell me about it," muttered a man with vivid red hair (Live XXL Real Red, thankyouvery_fucking_much,) fishing around the pocket of his flamingo printed lime green short's pocket for a lighter. The words on the back of a broad man's leather vest were soon lost amongst the crowd but the message still resonated within the redhead's mind, bony arms resting on a fence as he took a drag from his just lit cigarette. _He_ was the someone somewhere who was tired of her shit. No matter how good she looked, no matter how she made him feel.


	2. before

I do not plan on sleeping or eating until I finish writing this. Let's see how coherently this will end.

FACT: THERE ARE AT LEAST TWO DOCUMENTED CASES OF PEOPLE HANGING THEMSELVES FROM A TREE BRANCH AND NO ONE NOTICING BECAUSE THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE A HALLOWEEN DECORATION.

* * *

There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die. Axel Ninguém was his name, don't wear it out. Though his best friend, his only friend really, would raise an eyebrow and smack him up the head whenever he presented himself as such. Ninguém wasn't his real surname, you see, and, as Roxas put it, "You're not even Portuguese, man!"

ooo

It was a Sunday and Axel had been the first to arrive at the blonde's appartment, just before lunch, and Roxas' mother, a divorced seamstress who'd tailored all of Roxas' clothes, let him in with a warm smile. "Hello Axel. How ever do you do?" she asked as she received the psychedelic monstrosity Axel spent all morning preparing.

"Not too bad Ma'am, and yourself?"

"Oh, just preparing some tea. Would you like a cup?"

Axel, by reflex, wrinkled his nose. Roxas' mother always bought cheap tea imported from Wonderland and sometimes even from the Land of Dragons. The redhead once found a tin full of sawdust, dried and pow-dered hay, grass-seed, and departed but un-lamented insects. Moral – buy good tea, or go without. So Axel went without and respectfully declined the offer with a "No thankyou Ma'am."

"Roxas is still in his room Axel honey," she said stepping towards the kitchen, carefully carrying the psychedelic happy cake (but Roxas' mother wasn't to know that, shh,) that resembled unicorn vomit (afterall, Axel had made sure to use every colour in his food dye set) with the words "Happy 18th Birthday Rox-Ass" and underneath "You're finally non-jailbait buddy" all written in thick white frosting.

"He's slept through the whole morning!"

Chuckling, Axel walked over to his friend's room and burst in uncaring if he caught the boy in his birthday suit or not. "Happy birthday Blond-" but the words died on Axel's lips as he took in the scene. Roxas was quietly sitting on his bed, hunched over his crossed legs, dressed only in his Jack Skellington boxers, hands palm up resting on his knees, head bent over, blonde hair obscuring his face from view. Axel went rigid as he took in the thick cord knotted from a hook on the ceiling to his friend's neck.

It was taut.

ooo

_"Axel, are there really that many ways to hang yourself?_"

_Both boys were sitting_ _on the edge of the clock tower, overlooking the quiet town people tranversed but rarely stayed in._ _The sun was setting and bathed them in the dying rays of summer.  
_

_"Hmm. The people here are really superstitious about hanging. Some people believe that hanging yourself while sitting or lying down makes you immortal."_

_Roxas looked pensive, "But how can you hang yourself while sitting?_"

_"It's simple. Look, my hand is the rope around your neck. Simply, when sitting..." A__xel placed his hand behind his neck_, _arm wrapping around it, "...you bow, the knot tightens from the weight, but you stay balanced._ _And you'd have to make sure that the rope is short enough to exert the necessary force on the windpipe. By the time your survival reflexes kick in, standing up may not be an option."_

_"A__nd it's horrors like this that you study everyday?__"_ _Axel snorted and Roxas scowled in return, kicking his left foot forward and watching his flip flop come off and plummet through the air, twirling down to its target, whatever that may be. "I do not want to talk of this again, okay?"_

_"Roxas? Does it make you afraid of dying?__"_

_"N__o. I do not care about living, but I have no reason to die. If I had a good reason... maybe... maybe I could die."_

_Axel felt creeped out at how serious his best friend sounded, a weird premonition settling heavy in his toes, weighing his legs down. Clearing his throat he decided to label it as paranoia induced by the vertigo of being perched so high up and babbled on without thinking, "I__t scares me. I read all this because I want to understand. But in the end, I've learned nothing. Roxas, what reason would you die for?__"_

_Roxas never replied. A real saintly hypocrite.  
_

ooo

Axel had stayed mute and staring, eyes never blinking, at the corpse of his best friend. He'd never be able to tell you how long he stood there but his eyes were dry by the time the doorbell rang and Roxas' friends from highschool came in laughing and talking loudly, footsteps heading to the blonde's room. The noise died down. Axel started when he felt someone brush past him and he exited the room, heading for the kitchen as a buzzing started, someone crying out "Roxas? Roxas?! What's wrong, why aren't you reactin– ROXAS?!" Axel walked into the kitchen, trying to put a distance between him and the buzzing, the angry wasps that would bite and sting, as Roxas' mother ran past him to her son's room. Approaching the happy cake Axel started stuffing it by the handfull into his mouth, choking and gagging, desperately trying to get a high, for this to be a bad dream.

Someone screamed.

ooo

The redhead had stayed in that kitchen long after the guests left, long after the police and paramedics had come and gone, comforting Roxas' mother without really meaning it, his entire being numb, mind blank.

A complete _zombie_.

Sometime between Roxas' mothers weeping dying down to a shallow breathing in and out and Axel heading out the door and tripping down the stairs, sometime in between those two moments, Axel had laid down in his best friend's bed, the bed in which he'd died, and fingered the cracks on the wall as he thought about Roxas: Roxas tying the rope around his neck, Roxas struggling for breathe, Roxas twitching as his body slowly shut down, Roxas, Roxas, Roxas, (did he have any regrets? any last words? did he feel any panic as he realised this was the end, that he was never coming back?) Roxas fucking _dying _while Axel was in some dirty alleyway fucking a blonde girl he'd picked up hard against a wall with the words "_God died tonight" _graffitied in black spray paint. Axel felt the bile rising up his throat and promptly threw up ove the edge of the bed and quickly exited the room.

ooo

Roxas had commited suicide on that crisp October day, ("Autumn is, like, the decay of summer, man." he'd always say,) and with Roxas gone, Axel had no reason to stay here. That night he left Tranverse Town and he never came back. Needless to say, Axel hadn't bothered attending the funeral.


	3. meeting

Cigarrete count: 25. Vodka shots: 3.

FACT: ABOUT 75% OF HOMELESS TEENS USE DRUGS OR ALCOHOL AS A MEANS TO SELF-MEDICATE TO DEAL WITH THE TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCES AND ABUSE THEY FACE.

* * *

As he drove through the outskirts of the bad side of Tranverse Town, a maze of dirty alleyways populated by junkies and prostitues, Axel picked up a bleached blonde runaway called Naminé.

He had been turning into the road which would lead him straight out of that godforsaken town when he abruptly slammed his foot on the brakes as a pale, blonde girl suddenly came into view. With all the pent up rage which had been coiling in his stomach ever since leaving Roxas' house Axel stuck his head out of the car window and yelled obsceneties and watch-where-the-fuck-you're-going-you-crazy-bitch, spit flying, face contorted, while the girl just walked up to him, pushed his head back into his car with a pale finger and leaned in, arms resting on the window.

"I would like, if I may, to be taken on a strange journey," she'd said in a quiet croaky voice that fit with her withered and bony appearance, cigarette in hand as she gazed intently into Axel's eyes, half a smirk on her lips, lifeless baby blue eyes outlined in black eyeliner and red eyeshadow . In the dim light he could pretend she was Roxas' ghost asking for a ride away from this grey Purgatory. Lips set in a grim line he let her in and jammed his foot on the accelerator.

ooo

His companion talked about how her hair was dried up and destroyed after a decade of dye – and, oh, how she missed her raven dark hair! Dressed up in a flimsy black top with faded golden crosses and a worn out black denim miniskirt he noticed the track marks on her bony arms, bruised with intricate patterns of purple veins, collapsed from the hardness of heroin.

During the drive Axel kept stealing glances while she prattled away, downing Grey Goose vodka from the bottle every sentence or two, and noticed her collection of tattoos: on her left bicep was the drawing of a crude moon-like face grinning wickledly with the words "BE CIVIL or I'll eat the sun" scrawled below, another one on her right wrist said, "I don't owe you shit" written in a loopy cursive font and a third one on her thigh was a raven with the words "L'art est la solution au chaos" beside it.

She lifted her legs and let her feet rest on the dashboard and Axel could see another tattoo, a forth one, with japanese styled blossoms and the phrase "Anticipation is killing me when butterflies have knives cutting up my insides" stacked vertically stretching from her knee to her ankle.

Catching Axel's various looks at her body art Naminé set down the vodka bottle between her thighs and said, "I have another one above my right breast from a Beatle's song," the next part she sang out loud, "_Happiness is like a warm gun_."

ooo

An hour or so later and Naminé was well drunk, words a slur from all the vodka she kept chasing down, about how heroin was her heroine and the euphoria was the only thing that mattered. Axel asked if she was old enough to drink and she huffed in reply.

"I mean, come on princess, you can't be any older than, what, 16?"

Naminé scowled and said, "It's okay to get drunk, Axel, if you need to real bad. Only you have to get drunk on vodka. Cognac and wine – that's all for the heart."

Axel looked at her from the corner of his acid green eyes, watching her come in and out of the headlights. "So what's vodka for?"

"For the soul. If it's hurting real bad."

They stayed quiet, Naminé drinking and occasionally plucking a cigarette from Axel's pack of Marlboro Red ("Dude, you shoul totally buy Pall Mall, Vonnegut says that's the classy way to commit suicide!,") until Axel pulled up to a gas station some five hours later.

ooo

Naminé, dressed up in his brown hoodie (with a lion print on the back and the words "The Bird Hermes is my name, eating my wings to be tame" scribbled in all caps with a black Sharpie underneath) to avoid passerbys staring at her arms, talked about her life with such abandon that Axel couldn't be sure if she was lying or just freakishly open about herself. As he filled up the tank of his beaten up red Mustang, she spoke about how she was an artist, how she painted portraits of Barbara Streisand and how she planned on doing her Masters on… well, Barbara Streisand.

"What's so great about Barbara Streisand?"

"What's not so great about Barbara Streisand?!" the bottle blonde countered back. "She made a great impact on me before I became deaf."

"…You're deaf?!"

Naminé nodded, moving her foot to some unknown beat playing in her head as she look at him with her lifeless baby blue eyes and said, "If you're wondering how I can keep a conversation with you it's because I'm one hell of a great lip reader."

Naminé was staring out of the window as they pulled out of the gas station and they drove in silence, Axel quietly pondering on everything she'd said. Well, that explained why she was always staring intently at his mouth. Not because she had an urge to kiss him, or maybe that too, but not entirely.

Axel asked himself how he hadn't realised it before.


End file.
